There's no way in hell we have the resolution to see continents in another star system.
Considering we only know it's there because it slightly dims the light from its star as it crosses during its orbit, you would be correct. At that distance, we would never see light bouncing off the actual planet. Even the star is basically a single pixel. We can estimate its size and orbit based on how quickly it crosses in front of the star and how much the light dims, and using those two numbers we can estimate its distance from Kepler 452.
I thought they could also see atmospheric composition as it passes in front of the star, no? Having that info and the data you’ve just mentioned they postulate if it’s habitable or not. Obviously not seeing any detail at all about land mass shapes, but perhaps composition? I’m not a spaceologist, so I’m only musing.
Yeah, but it's still just a single pixel of light from the star. It just changes color slightly when the planet passes in front of it and the atmosphere gases absorb certain characteristic wavelengths.
We can build a telescope to see this by the way. The lens being the gravitational warping of spacetime by the sun. We go waaaay past the orbit of Pluto (I forgot the exact distance) and send probes there. We can have quite nice pictures of planets up to pretty nice distances.
Easy trip to make; it took the voyagers only about 40 years to pass Pluto?
Depends on your definition of "easy". Here's the wiki article about it.
How did they get it to pose next to earth for this photo?
Kepler-452b was having a private conversation with Australia when the photographer snuck up and got the candid photo.
Unfortunately Kepler-452b was embarrassed by having the intimate moment interrupted and left in a hurry.
Though their conversation was pleasant, the photographer ruined the mood and numbers were not exchanged.
* slaps sphere *
"You can fit so much Perlin noise on this baby."
Earth 2 exists, except it’s twice the size of Earth and could be a scorched wasteland for all we know.
Whenever I see an update on these sort of articles, the planet always ends up being a tide-locked hell-scape full of toxic chemicals.
https://xkcd.com/2202/ moment
Slightly unrelated but I got a solid chuckle out of the different modes they added in the drop down on the XKCD website under teh comic, Space Opera mode is my favorite.
So basically what billionaires are trying to turn the world into? /s
You may not like it, but that's what's what peak habitability looks like
spoiler
for lizard people
Because the computer-generated images that symbolize said other planets are generally done with some shitty-shit stupid noise algorithm to generate the surface rather than anything decent (well, at least it's not uniform noise), whilst the ones for planet Earth just use existing map data for the Earth surface.
As it so happens I've been working on a game that has planets, so here's an example generated with better algorithms:
PS: also note that for game purposes, the athmosphere is unrealistically thick as a proportion of planetary radius, purelly because it looks better. A lot of choices in game making are mainly artistic freedom which at first people with a Science or Engineering background tend to shy away from "because it's not how things are".
I think it's also that we choose the most photogenic angle for earth, if you pick a random angle of earth it sometimes doesn't look as good.
e.g.
do you have an algorithm for picking a photogenic angle for your game?
...because Slartibartfast didn't hand design them like he did for earth?
There are not enough fidly-bits on this new planet
Here, go nuts:
https://calandiel.itch.io/gleba
Best freely available, scientifically based planet generator I've been able to find.
Fermi paradox solution: aliens approach from a direction where the first part they see is the Philippines and Indonesia, and just say "nah I'm not learning all those names of islands", and leave.
Or they just approach from this angle and go "Ah, nothing here" and move on
Are we landmass shaming now?
Am I the only one around here who doesn’t think it looks like shit?
Geoscentific and ecological implications aside, they have a huge ass continent with multiple giant lakes and small peninsulas all around. With a comparable vegetation to earth, this would look amazing in person, I believe.
Don't worry. If us humans showed up on Kepler-452b tomorrow and it had a breathable atmosphere, those lakes would probably be gone in a few hundred years.
Yeah. Those astronauts would be super thirsty after that trip
So would the breathable atmosphere.
Artists rendering
Documentaries and science communication in general has always been waaaay too fucking lax on properly disclosing artists' renderings. Every field suffers from it, but I have to say astrophysics and astronomy are the absolute worst about it.
They’d probably like to come colonize our planet, but with 2x the gravity of Earth, I bet it’s hard to build a rocket that can actually get them into space, much less travel 1800 light years.
As someone who used mapmaking software for decades I agree they all look randomly generated.
So thats where rimworld got the shitty planet generation from. Seriously, I want big contiguous oceans. Not like I can use the vast majority of the planet anyway.
How dare you shit talk Pangea like that
That's where they land in Raised By Wolves, right?
That show had so much potential as true high sci-fi and it was completely wasted
That show was legit incredible, and cancelling it was a massive fuckup.
No but seriously, why DO continents/landmasses on other planets give a sense of unease/uncanny valley (at least to me)? Is it just the lack of familiarity?
It's an artist's impression. We almost certainly got no idea what its continents look like at that distance.
We almost certainly got no idea what its continents look like at that distance.
I understand this, but I also get unease from RNG maps from games like Age of Empires or Anno, and I've talked to a couple of other people who also have experienced this, so I was wondering if there was an underlying psychology to it. However, it's not an easily Googleable query, and I refuse to ask an AI chatbot about it.
Abnormalities from "normal" were a critical self defence feature, for our ancestors. E.g. a lack, or change, of bird song might indicate a predator in ambush. Unusual lighting might indicate a storm coming in.
Our brains are wired to learn normal patterns. When those patterns change completely, we are fine with it. When they change subtly we don't like it.
The threshold for this is different for different people. Personally, I'm fine with completely different maps, but off put by modified real maps. I also cannot watch soap operas, they are too close to "real" and trip alarms at their mismatches. Conversely, sci-fi and fantasy are fine, they are different enough to not set off my alarms. I know others who are set off by sci-fi, but soaps are within their norms.
I think a lot of it is humans are used to maps formed by tectonic plates shifting, glaciers forming and melting, storms and other weather, etc... When it's just an RNG heightmap it's missing all those familiar features like rivers, mountains, and dry lakebeds
Beyond what's been said already, we 100% do not have any way to take a picture of a planet outside our solar system that shows any detail of the planet's surface, and no plans to make a telescope that can do that. What we do right now to even tell if there are planets around other starts is look at the star's light and see if it gets slightly darker on regular intervals, indicating that a planet is crossing between us and the star in a regular orbit. Right now we can barely take a decent picture of Pluto, which is in our solar system. And checking the light brightness is really only good for looking for large planets the size of Jupiter and Saturn.
It's like seeing a car at night on a mountainside 4 miles away with its headlights on. It's just sitting there and you are wondering if it's a car or something else. It's hard to even tell it's 2 lights, it just looks like one light from that distance. But what would we see if someone walked in front of the car with the headlights on? The light get dim on one side and bright again, then dim and bright again on the other side. Sort of the same thing.
As for the uncanny valley part, it's because whoever came up with the graphic just did a random splash of water and land. The planet could be orange and magenta-colored, we have no idea. They used colors familiar to us looking at images of Earth because the intent is to make you think "it's like Earth, but different."
It looks so shit cause they've already nuked themselves to planetary death. And because of climate change and rising sea level. Also ecosystem degradation and subsequent soil erosion. I've heard you need to prevent these to keep Earth beautiful. Just for the aesthetics. Think about the astronauts, what if they had to look at an ugly Earth?
Since it's just perlin noise anyway... They should use gag landmasses for fun. See if anyone recognises Middle Earth or the Seven Kingdoms.
Because one of them (Earth) is based on reality, and the other is a poorly done conceptual render because no human actually knows the shape of the landmasses on that planet on account of having never been there.
A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
